Russian Court Decides School Teacher Doesn't Deserve Siberian Prison For Buying PCs With Pirated Windows
from the but-why-was-he-in-court-in-the-first-place dept
Following the high level political appeals from Russian officials to Microsoft about how ridiculous it was that a Russian school head teacher faced Siberian imprisonment because the computers he bought for his students had pirated copies of Windows pre-installed, it appears that the Russian courts have agreed. They've thrown out the case, saying that it was "trivial." Prosecutors could still appeal -- but with so many people against them hopefully they decide it's not worth it. In the meantime, all the publicity still has Russian schools thinking about alternatives to proprietary software. It's beginning to sound like this whole case was something of a charade. The US has been putting pressure on Russia to "crack down" on intellectual property violations, saying how they won't let Russia into the WTO unless they do things like shut down Allofmp3.com. It appears that a case like this probably initially seemed like a good idea, where Russian officials could point to an example of them "cracking down" on intellectual property violations. Then the details became clear and everyone realized they were sending a school teacher who was just trying to educate his students to prison.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Yey for common sense
At least one country seems to have IP saavy courts
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Yey for common sense
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Yey for common sense
IP saavy - to know and understand the issues, limitations and applications of intellectual property law and its violations
i.e. that this wasn't one of them
:p
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Yey for common sense
Enrico Suarve wrote:
While I applaud the court's decision, I'm not so sure you can attribute it to IP-savviness. President Putin had already stated he thought the case was "complete nonsense, simply ridiculous", so it could very well be that the judge simply took a cue from that.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Yey for common sense
It just cheered me up a little to hear he wasn't getting sent to Siberia to help his political masters make a point
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Between this and the blatant ripoff of everything designed by Mac I can't wait until Microsoft has a full monopoly of everything computerized. I can rest assured that every system I put together in prison work camp is being used by a blameless, law abiding servant-citizen.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Just further proof..
The US is a gigantic mass of bumbling fools who can't see past their greedy little hands with a death grip on every cent they can get. Apparently we would rather reject Russia, the 2nd largest nuclear power in the world, from joining the WTO because the music industry lobbyists will pull out campaign contributions. The US is facing more and more problems, primarily in agriculture due to the earth’s NATURAL changing weather cycle. Russia is primarily farmlands, and always has been. Their climate is generally the same all the time. Instead of inviting them into the WTO to help alleviate some of the pressure for the US to feed the world, we'd rather reject them because they wont shut down a website? Well with moronic thinking like that it's no wonder they keep entering into new deals with China. I pray someone in congress will actually take the time to acknowledge the US foreign policy is an archaic relic that needs to be abolished, and grow themselves a spine to standup for what’s right. If nuclear winter doesn't kill us all first, an epidemic of aneurisms will due to continual exposure to this level of idiocy.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Just further proof..
It really is absurd that we would let business decide what we do. wait...special report in from Exxon, I guess now we are invading Iran
Reed
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Then Steve wanted Microsoft to port its popular word-processor from DOS to their Apple OS, so they had to reveal how their OS worked, essentially revealing their implementation of Xerox's technology.
I don't think MS did anything improper in this scenarion.
--
Richard
[ link to this | view in chronology ]